TeamPitfalls®
The Method
After 10 years managing international teams in diverse fields such as medical, aerospace, robotics or fintech, Maxime Castéra developed the TeamPitfalls® method to challenge his teams and force them out of their comfort zone.
The robot is used as a proxy for a product being developed and contributes to exposing team members to people, technical, planning or even political issues well known in a corporate project, but in a safe and feedback-friendly environment.
The key learning is no-one can succeed alone, the answer is in the Team.
Challenge discovery


Design Build Fail Restart
The teams attempt to build a robot which would address the challenge and its requirements. Teams are free to organize as they see fit. This is the key moment of the workshop, this is when team pitfalls tend to pop out. This is where learning starts.
Demonstration
Teams gather to demonstrate how their robot solves the challenge and explain their choices, both technical and organizational. Winning team comes out.


04
Retrospective
For who
Both technical and non-technical teams benefit from our Team Pitfalls sessions, as they are facing challenges specific to their background.
Team Development
Throughout our workshops we help you press reset, and restart the right dynamic.
Recruitment
Onboarding New Team Members
Innovation
Digital Transformation
Remote Team Integration
Being remote can leave team members feeling isolated, misunderstood and less engaged. Whether silence means Yes or No for your team members, our workshop will make communication needs very concrete, very fast.

The tasks allowed for our people to forge strong relationships, fail together and then re-build for greater success. Who knew something so simple could have such an impact. Many of our employees used the various feedback and learning sessions to share some truly valuable personal insights.
The tasks created an environment we thrive in here at ABI – one of competition challenge and growth. This is not to say some of our team struggled with the concept of learning from their failure. Having said that each team reflected positively on her they will now deal with failure, learn from it and use it to become stronger and more effective.
We would recommend TeamPitfalls® to an organisation or team who truly want to understand how they can learn from failure, a team who are comfortable being uncomfortable to become more effective and successful.

A very efficient and fun hands-on method to discover common team behavior within a typical project setup.
It brought us applicable insights about how to improve teamwork between business and IT.

We organized a TeamPitfalls® workshop with the senior management team of the BESIX Engineering Department.
The workshop was a real eye opener for all involved who were unanimously enthusiast about the concept and the guidance by Maxime.
Combining creative thinking with ‘hands and minds’ in a spontaneous team set up really helped us to understand team dynamics much better.
We learned that fun, focus, simplification and continuous testing of ideas is a great way to achieve unexpected results.
I would recommend this training and Maxime to all teams who believe in passion and co-creation as the foundation of success!

Nous avons effectué avec mon équipe un TeamPitfalls® workshop, le but étant entre autres de mettre en évidence les forces et les faiblesses de notre équipe.
En effet, les personnes ont pu voir les difficultés d’alignement entre infrastructure et développement, les problèmes de communication en interne, le problème de gestion de temps et bien d’autres.
Ce workshop a aussi permis une toute autre dynamique d’équipe très positive et de remise en question les jours qui ont suivis.

Sur base de quelques directives très simples et l’utilisation d’un matériel que nous avons tous utilisé plus jeunes, cet exercice révèle les talents individuels et de team sous un jour nouveau.
Ecoute, interprétation, teamwork, délégation, partage, jusqu’auboutisme, leadership, humilité, learning mindset, sont quelques uns des comportements que ce moment étonnant et plein de fraîcheur permet d’observer.
Merci Maxime pour l’excellence de ton accompagnement !

I arranged for Max to come and run a training day for the L&D teams within the Safran UK group.
Everyone was very excited to attend and Max did not disappoint.
This highly interactive session really tackled the question that was posed and the feedback has been very positive.
I particularly liked how everyone got involved in the discussions, as this is not always the case, and everyone was thoroughly engaged, the day seemed to fly past.
Hugely successful and we will definitely run again.

I had the opportunity to attend the TeamPitfalls® workshop during a Meetup. This unique and great workshop highlights the typical dysfunctions of a project that tend to emerge in the team’s behavior.
The environment set up by the facilitator is safe and enable retrospective discussions.
Such a great workshop is a must to any Agile team!